Now my baby girl wants to be a socialite

“Mum who is a socialite?,” my seven-year-old daughter Tasha recently asked me. “Ah... a socialite is...a socialite,” I mumbled on before she threw another salvo.

“Muuuum kwani you don’t know? A socialite is Vera Sidika,” she said with that innocence of a child. Bingo! I am finished, she even knows Vera Sidika.

Before I could even digest that, she finished it with a killer line, “Mum when I grow up, I want to be a socialite so that I can be as beautiful as Vera Sidika.”

What! With all the money I have pumped into that money-minting academy plus the education insurance I have secured for her so that she can get the best education, the best that can come out of her is a socialite! No way!

Now when your daughter declares that she wants to be a socialite (by the way what does a socialite do for a living?) after all the investment you have made in her, that’s catastrophic.

That is a hard pill to swallow. It would have been better if she told me she wanted to be a DJ or a hairdresser; that would have made more sense. But a socialite, that is too much to handle. Where exactly did my daughter see this queen of socialites that now she wants to be one? I asked myself.

The culprit is, of course, mainstream and social media. Media is knowingly or unknowingly glorifying this creature called a socialite, every young girl thinks it’s the best thing since Facebook. From the broadcast to the print media, everywhere you turn there is socialite pulling off something to get attention.

For the sake of young girls who need serious role models, I think the media needs to give all socialites a blackout ASAP! There is one who even appeared in court for not paying a bill and now she is a celeb and has even landed a lucrative job at a radio station.

No wonder Tasha wants a piece of the pie. Socialite-ism is selling to young girls the idea that the ticket to a good life is not a good education or brilliant brains, but a hot face and big behind. What happened to merit? Where are the Lupitas of this land to give direction to our girls?

What is the essence of going all the way to university if there is a short-cut in the name of uploading nude photos on the Internet? That is the narrative socialites are creating.

Our young girls deserve better role models. They need to believe that hard work and merit pays. Shaniqua, please pass that simple message to your baby sisters. Or ‘nitawa’ murder.....